


One Lab Accident From Supervillainy

by rebelmeg



Series: Rebelmeg's Tony Stark Bingo 2018 [5]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Post-Avengers (2012), Steve Rogers & Tony Stark Friendship, Steve Rogers Is a Good Bro, Tony Stark Bingo 2018, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony-centric, We got cheated out of this friendship in the MCU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 20:56:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15916092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rebelmeg/pseuds/rebelmeg
Summary: On bad days, Tony amuses himself by thinking up all the ways he could end the world.  He's not gonna do it... but he knows how he could.





	One Lab Accident From Supervillainy

**Author's Note:**

> We were absolutely cheated out of seeing an actual friendship from Tony and Steve in the movies, SO HERE, HAVE SOME! This was written for the Tony Stark Bingo, square SI: One lab accident from supervillainy
> 
> (TSB roundup info in the end notes)

Whenever Tony was in a certain frame of mind, the frame of mind where he hated himself and hated the world and most of the people in it, he amused himself with what might be called delusions of grandeur. He’d already built a monument to the skies with his name plastered all over it, he’d already become not just one, but two of the most recognizable figures in the world. He’d already paid a portion of the unending penance he owed.

So what was it going to hurt to play, just a little bit, on the wrong side of righteousness?

It was fun, it was harmless, and when he couldn’t escape the parts of himself that weren’t good enough anyway, sometimes it helped to think of all the ways he _could_ do the worst things, but never, ever really would.

For example, he had come up with no less than 37 ways to completely obliterate the stock market, and that would send most of the world into a financial tailspin that would rival, and in some cases surpass, the Great Depression.

And that was just the beginning. There were so many ways to take over or end the world. And he was a genius, it wasn’t like it was hard to figure out.

Sometimes… when things were really bad, when he hadn’t been able to sleep for days for the screaming of the judgmental conscience in his head, he’d even put a plan partially in motion. Just for research purposes, just to see if things would go the way he thought. Testing the waters, so to speak, seeing how long it would take for person X to realize that system Y had been tampered with. If anyone would notice a security breach in the allotted measure of time. If something as simple as one line of code could escape the notice of the best and brightest the world had to offer.

It always went the way he thought it would. And he was always shocked, afterward, how easy it would be to leave the world in ruins.

Sometimes, Tony felt a little bit better about it, after. If he was capable of doing so much from a single computer in his lab, could he really shoulder all the guilt himself for not being able to stop any intergalactic madman that decided to try and end the world on a whim?

He never put anything into motion that would do any harm. Lines of code were deleted as soon as he knew no one would notice it. Security breaches were discreetly removed, and if he made small tweaks to the system on his way out to prevent exactly that kind of thing from happening again, it’s not like anyone would ever know.

Jarvis always kept an eye on things. The AI had been curious, and then worried, and then outright panicked the first time Tony had hacked a few systems and decrypted several foreign nuclear codes, ready to shut down the lab entirely and call for any help he could think of before Tony managed to explain that he wasn’t going to _do_ anything. He just… wanted to see how far he could get. How much of that delicately stacked house of cards he could compromise, if he wanted to. He never let it fall. It was his job, his _life_ to ensure it never fell. But he couldn’t help whispering through the tenuously balanced structure sometimes, identifying weaknesses, finding precisely which card he could tap just the slightest bit to have the whole thing come tumbling down.

Steve knew, too, which was kind of funny. Tony had been knee-deep in one particularly tricky scenario, testing himself to see if he could work out how to bring down the entire U.S. governing system _without_ hacking into anything, when Steve walked in. Tony had been surrounded by holoscreens, muttering to himself like a crazy person, and it had taken Captain America all of fifteen seconds to figure out what was going on. Tony was pretty sure he’d been about an inch from death until he and Jarvis had managed to explain, and he wasn’t even sure that they’d really been able to assuage the good Captain’s worries. He tended to show up out of the blue a lot when Tony was planning his next faux world domination.

“I always thought maybe you were one lab accident away from supervillainy.” Steve remarked one night, watching as Tony systematically “disabled” the security system in the world’s largest prison one camera, door, and gate at a time. It was like watching someone play that computer game, Minesweeper, when you were sure they were somehow cheating because you didn’t understand how they did it.

Tony’s lips twisted into something like a smirk, but there was really too much bitterness in it to really count.

“Yep, that’s me. Merchant of Death. I even came with my own supervillain name.” 

Steve realized he struck a nerve (not a hard thing to do, when Tony was like this), seeing that sharp edge of self-loathing in Tony’s face, and his voice softened. “You can do this all you want, Tony, but we both know you’re not a supervillain.” 

“Not yet, but I could be.”

Steve just smiled, tossing a balled up piece of sketch paper at his friend and watching it bounce off the top of his head. “You couldn’t.”

Tony glared half-heartedly, too much of a pout on his face and a sparkle in his eye for Steve to take it seriously, rubbing at his dark tousled hair as if a watermelon had bounced off of it instead of a piece of paper. “Yeah, who’s gonna stop me? You?” 

Steve just grinned, settling more comfortably on the lab couch and picking up his pencil again to start a new sketch. “Nah, I’d just call Pepper.” 

Tony opened his mouth, probably to argue, but then shut it again. “Damn it, that would be way more effective.”

Steve kept smiling as he doodled a caricature of Tony in a ridiculous supervillain costume with a dramatic cape, striking a domineering pose, with a speech bubble that said “BWA-HA-HA!” Tony was muttering to himself about figuring out a failsafe way to keep Pepper out of the lab if he really wanted to go supervillain, swiping away his theoretical prison break plan and pulling up a schematic of a new and improved pair of nano-pants for Bruce when he Hulked out. Steve looked at the genius fondly, then wrote something on the back of his sketch, just a quick reminder:

_“Anyone with a heart like yours could never be a villain.”_

It was hard sometimes to be a hero, with a hint of a supervillain lurking in his brain. But Tony supposed he always had at least a couple people, AI and real, that would keep an eye on him, just in case.

(He put Steve's sketch on the fridge in the lab, right next to the picture of Pepper’s “Proof That Tony Stark Has A Heart” thing that she’d made for him. It was comforting, sometimes, to look over at the sketch and the picture after he’d plotted his next devious plan. He could send that plan to the trash bin, and smirk at his own over-dramatic caricature, and something in him would loosen slightly at the thought that a doodle on the fridge was as close as he would ever come to being someone truly evil.)

**Author's Note:**

> One Lab Accident From Supervillainy  
> Square Filled: S1  
> Rating: General  
> Warnings: No warnings  
> Summary: On bad days, Tony amuses himself by thinking up all the ways he could end the world. He's not gonna do it... but he knows how he could. Steve is a good friend. (Tony and Steve friendship)


End file.
